If you have excellent drivers, why would you care if the specs are out or not.

Because many of us aren't satisfied with the inherent limitations of a binary-only driver. Only recently NVIDIA abandoned their older hardware and have yet to provide the "legacy" package they promised. If the sources for the "fundamentals" of their older video card cores were made available, we could have 3D acceleration on cards NVIDIA no longer sell.

The argument that "proprietary is okay if it's good proprietary" is bull****. People want to able to use hardware they paid for in any way they like. Since NVIDIA's IP considerations are moot for ancient hardware, why not release the specs/driver sources?

People with older cards will be abandoned otherwise. It's the same crappy MS upgrade cycle all over again.

For years it has been possible to produce opensource nvidia drivers but nobody has taken the time and courage to write them. For Haiku (opensource beos clone) Rudolf Cornelissen ported the old opensource nvidia drivers (utah-glx) to it, fixed bugs and added DMA support to it which at the time made utah-glx so slow. Performance isn't optimal yet as multitexturing for instance is missing but it could surely be ported back to linux and dri.

If NVIDIA want to keep the IP rights to their entire driver, they should then release well written hardware specifications documenting their older GPUs. From there, people will be able to write legal, IP compatible drivers for any architecture.

As I wanted to point out rudolf's driver can form a base for a solid driver. That driver works upto a geforce4mx right now in 3d because most things kept working the same starting from the tnt. It doesn't have to be that much extra work to get it working on more modern hardware. Some additional DMA commands would be needed. Guess it won't be possible to get modern stuff like vertex and pixel shaders working but it would certainly be possible to get a solid 3d driver that runs applications like quake3.

Just accept it guys, Linux/PPC is not a big market, nobody has interest in writing drivers and supporting it. Nvidia already supports Linux/x86/x86-64, Solaris, FreeBSD and Windows. Nobody supported that many platforms before.

Demanding them to release the specs is just silly. If they thought that would serve any good I believe they would, they're not "evil" or anything...

Actually the only thing I don't like about nVidia drivers is the way of bug reporting and fixing. Bugzilla would be great and would make things more transparent.
The current situation is that nVidia releases new driver and we always have to do tests to find out wheter they have fixed the problem. If not then mail them and blame them again and make another 100 posts that you need that fixed and so on....

That is certainly untrue. You can be sure no such documentation to straight out write a driver exists even within NVidia. The drivers are surely developed on some base documentation, and then a lot of talks between the driver writer and the chipmaker standing by the coffeemaker. Not to mention the sessions they spend debugging at a hardware level. Or the exchange between the Linux and the Windoze teams.

ATI documented the cards up to Radoen 9200 for the DRI project. Even this documentation is not sufficient as such. You can read a lot of bitchingwhiningcomplaining about it on the DRI mailing lists.

From my work experience as a programmer I would even say the reverse of what you say is true. It is probably easier to come up with a good enough piece of software than with documentation for the underlying mechanism to write all possible pieces of software on top.

Personally I am losing patience with NVidia. I was swallowing them not documenting the 3D cards. But now that they use the same argument on SATA and GbE chips it is obvious that this is is rooted in attitude.

For once I agree with Martin, there's no good technical reason to withhold specifications on hardware that it either not inventive or complex (SATA, GbE implementations), rooted in specifications anyway, or on hardware that is now obsolete.

By doing so, they are just trying to control their consumer's ability to continue to use the hardware in whatever way they wish (and for as long as they like). Remember that although some people will claim we're being "unfair" asking NVIDIA to "spend money and developer resources" on writing drivers or specifications, bare in mind that we're still paying the $150 for the cards and we expect to be able to use them on any moderately common hardware/software combination. I'd prefer specifications to drivers. I know open drivers would suit Linux better. Everybody does.

As far as I am aware, most companies concerned about IP but which respect their customers' right to use hardware without officially supported drivers have come to a happy medium -- anything "intellectual" in the design of their hardware is obfuscated/wrapped with a firmware that exists either in an EEPROM or which can be loaded into memory every time the device is started. Such firmware is obfuscated to prevent reverse engineering, but is not necessarily architecture specific (making open, portable drivers more feasible). If Intel can do it with Centrino, I can see no reason why video card vendors couldn't do it with graphics hardware.

Then you just release specs regarding a subset of the hardware's modes and registers, and we can forget about driver optimisations (which somebody will eventually reinvent).

(This is, of course, all a pipe dream, but it's probably rooted in logic and I maintain that it's always better to be vocal on a subject so that the company might some day listen, instead of expecting them to Just Know).

That firmware thing would be about the same as my "higher abstracted binary core" that I suggested in the other thread. Doesn't make much difference whether it is firmware or loaded module in kernel space. Same core for Windoze, Linux, FreeBSD, Fluxkit and NeXTStep/x86 or whatever you use as long as it is the same processor architecture.

But as I said, since the same argument is now used to withhold documentation for SATA and GbE I don't buy that line of thought out of NVidia's mouth at all.

haayy people, wats up
did anyone hack the darwin drivers for linux?
if not that sucks,
i got a brand smacking new g5 powerpc64, its got a nvidia gefore go card, and no driverrrrrrrrrssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss ss.
really bad
im pissed off,
nvidia is just being lazy, they could write the drivers if they wanted, but they are just being bXXchy about it.

Does anyone know on how to enable 3d support with the xorg dri drivers?